Whatever Happened to Gary Cooper? A Seven-Step Program to Return America to a Quieter, Less Muscular, Patriotism

I have a few confessions to make: After almost eight years of off-and-on war
in Afghanistan and after more than six years of mayhem and death since "Mission Accomplished" was
declared in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I'm tired of seeing simpleminded magnetic
ribbons on vehicles telling me, a 20-year military veteran, to support or pray
for our troops. As a Christian, I find it presumptuous to see ribbons shaped
like fish, with an American flag as a tail, informing me that God blesses our
troops. I'm underwhelmed by gigantic American flags - up to 100 feet by 300
feet - repeatedly being unfurled in our sports arenas, as if our love of country
is greater when our flags are bigger. I'm disturbed by nuclear-strike bombers
soaring over stadiums filled with children, as one did in July just as the National
Anthem ended during this year's Major League Baseball All Star game. Instead
of oohing and aahing at our destructive might, I was quietly horrified at its
looming presence during a family event.

We've recently come through the steroid era in baseball with all those
muscled up players and jacked up stats. Now that players are tested randomly,
home runs are down and muscles don't stretch uniforms quite as tightly. Yet
while ending the steroid era in baseball proved reasonably straightforward once
the will to act was present, we as a country have yet to face, no less curtail,
our ongoing steroidal celebrations of pumped-up patriotism.

It's high time we ended the post-Vietnam obsession with Rambo's rippling pecs
as well as the jaw-dropping technological firepower of the recent cinematic
version of G.I. Joe and return to the resolute, undemonstrative
strength that Gary Cooper showed in movies like High Noon.

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony (played by James Gandolfini)
struggles with his own vulnerability - panic attacks caused by stress that
his Mafia rivals would interpret as fatal signs of weakness. Lamenting his emotional
frailty, Tony asks, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?" Whatever happened,
in other words, to quiet, unemotive Americans who went about their business
without fanfare, without swagger, but with firmness and no lack of controlled
anger at the right time?

Tony's question is a good one, but I'd like to spin it differently: Why did
we allow lanky American citizen-soldiers and true heroes like World War I Sergeant
Alvin
York (played, at York's insistence, by Gary Cooper) and World War
II Sergeant (later, first lieutenant) Audie Murphy (played in the film To
Hell and Back, famously, by himself) to be replaced by all those post-Vietnam
pumped up Hollywood "warriors," with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold
Schwarzenegger-style abs and egos to match?

And far more important than how we got here, how can we end our enduring fascination
with a puffed up, comic-book-style militarism that seems to have stepped directly
out of screen fantasy and into our all-too-real lives?

A Seven-Step Recovery Program

As a society, we've become so addicted to militarism that we don't even notice
the way it surrounds us or the spasms of societal 'roid rage that go with it.
The fact is, we need a detox program. At the risk of incurring some of that
'roid rage myself, let me suggest a seven-step program that could help return
us to the saner days of Gary Cooper:

1. Baseball players on steroids swing for the fences. So
does a steroidal country. When you have an immense military establishment, your
answer to trouble is likely to be overwhelming force, including sending troops
into harm's way. To rein in our steroidal version of militarism, we should stop
bulking up our military ranks, as is
now happening, and shrink them instead. Our military needs not more muscle supplements
(or the budgetary version of the same), but far fewer.

2. It's time to stop deferring to our generals, and even
to their commander-in-chief. They're ours, after all; we're not theirs. When
President Obama says Afghanistan is not a war of choice but of necessity,
we shouldn't hesitate to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Yet when
it comes to tough questioning of the president's generals, Congress now seems
eternally supine. Senators and representatives are invariably too busy falling
all over themselves praising our troops and their commanders, too worried that
"tough" questioning will appear unpatriotic to the folks back home,
or too connected to military contractors in their districts, or some combination
of the three.

Here's something we should all keep in mind: generals have no monopoly on military
insight. What they have a monopoly on is a no-lose situation. If things go well,
they get credit; if they go badly, we do. Retired five-star general Omar Bradley
was typical when he visited Vietnam in 1967 and declared: "I am convinced
that this is a war at the right place, at the right time and with the right
enemy - the Communists." North Vietnam's only hope for victory, he insisted,
was "to hang on in the expectation that the American public, inadequately
informed about the true situation and sickened by the loss in lives and money,
will force the United States to give up and pull out."

There we have it: A classic statement of the belief that when our military loses a
war, it's always the fault of "we the people." Paradoxically, such
insidious myths gain credibility not because we the people are too forceful
in our criticism of the military, but because we are too deferential.

3. It's time to redefine what "support our troops"
really means. We console ourselves with the belief that all our troops are volunteers,
who freely signed on for repeated tours of duty in forever wars. But are our
troops truly volunteers? Didn't we recruit them using multi-million dollar ad
campaigns and lures of every sort? Are we not, in effect, running a poverty
and recession draft? Isolated in middle- or upper-class comfort, detached from
our wars and their burdens, have we not, in a sense, recruited a "foreign legion" to do our
bidding?

If you're looking for a clear sign of a militarized society - which few Americans
are - a good place to start is with troop veneration. The cult of the soldier
often covers up a variety of sins. It helps, among other things, hide the true
costs of, and often the futility of, the wars being fought. At an extreme, as
the war began to turn dramatically against Nazi Germany in 1943, Germans who
attempted to protest Hitler's failed strategy and the catastrophic costs of
his war were accused of (and usually executed for) betraying the troops at the
front.

The United States is not a totalitarian state, so surely we can hazard criticisms
of our wars and even occasionally of the behavior of some of our troops, without
facing charges of stabbing our troops in the back and aiding the enemy. Or can
we?

4. Let's see the military for what it is: a blunt instrument
of force. It's neither surgical nor precise nor predictable. What Shakespeare
wrote 400 years ago remains true: when wars start, havoc is unleashed, and the
dogs of war run wild - in our case, not just the professional but the "mercenary"
dogs of war, those private contractors to the Pentagon that thrive on the rich spoils of modern warfare
in distant lands. It's time to recognize that we rely ever more massively to
prosecute our wars on companies that profit ever more handsomely the longer
they last.

5. Let's not blindly venerate the serving soldier, while
forgetting our veterans when they doff their spiffy uniforms for the last time.
It's easy to celebrate our clean-cut men and women in uniform when they're thousands
of miles from home, far tougher to lend a hand to scruffier, embittered veterans
suffering from the physical and emotional trauma of the battle zones to which
they were consigned, usually for multiple tours of duty.

6. I like air shows, but how about - as a first tiny step
toward demilitarizing civilian life - banning all flyovers of sporting events
by modern combat aircraft? War is not a sport, and it shouldn't be a thrill.

7. I love our flag. I keep my father's casket flag in a
special display case next to the very desk on which I'm writing this piece.
It reminds me of his decades of service as a soldier and firefighter. But I
don't need humongous stadium flags or, for that matter, tiny flag lapel pins
to prove my patriotism - and neither should you. In fact, doesn't the endless
post-9/11 public proliferation of flags in every size imaginable suggest a certain
fanaticism bordering on desperation? If we saw such displays in other countries,
our descriptions wouldn't be kindly.

Of course, none of this is likely to be easy as long as this country garrisons
the planet and fights open-ended wars on its global frontiers. The largest step,
the eighth one, would be to begin seriously downsizing that mission. In the
meantime, we shouldn't need reminding that this country was originally founded
as a civilian society, not a militarized one. Indeed, the
revolt of the 13 colonies against the King of England was sparked, in part,
by the perceived tyranny of forced quartering of British troops in colonial
homes, the heavy hand of an "occupation" army, and taxation that we
were told went for our own defense, whether we wanted to be defended or not.

If Americans are going to continue to hold so-called tea parties, shouldn't
some of them be directed against the militarization of our country and an enormous
tax burden fed in part by our wasteful, trillion-dollar wars?

Modest as it may seem, my seven-step recovery program won't be easy for many
of us to follow. After all, let's face it, we've come to enjoy our peculiar
brand of muscular patriotism and the macho militarism that goes with it. In
fact, we revel in it. Outwardly, the result is quite an impressive show. We
look confident and ripped and strong. But it's increasingly clear that our outward
swagger conceals an inner desperation. If we're so strong, one might ask, why
do we need so much steroidal piety, so many in-your-face patriotic props, and
so much parade-ground conformity?

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch
regular. He teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and can
be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..